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Friday, May 14, 2010

New Zealand is using leg-hold traps to catch feral cats

New Zealand, in my opinion, use some horrific methods to "control" so-called nuisance and feral animals. The latest is the use of leg-hold traps. Even the "soft-jaw" traps are still cruel. Its an open trap and the cat gets caught by one leg and then thrashes around for hours trying to free himself. Sometimes they try to bite off their leg in trying to get free. How this is seen in any way to be "humane" is totally beyond me.

"Peacock, a little stunned by it all, says feral cats are a real problem, that they use soft-jawed leg-traps and it is all part of a transparent and legal process. Callers ring in with their feral animal marketing slogans. Peacock says Tas has stopped using 1080 poison on possums. He says all CRC's need to have a commercial aspect to their operation.

"This is an accurate account - I was a bit stunned. We do support leg-hold trapping of cats using soft-jaw traps (as part of a management program, which it obviously was in this case); we don't employ people to soothe animal welfare concerns (I sit on two government working groups on animal welfare and our CRC has a policy not to undertake research where the welfare outcome can be predicted to be worse than currently available methods); and we don't hide our commercial members of the CRC - they are all appear on our website."

Killing feral animals does NOT solve the problem. A far better method is to TNR the cats--trap, neuter,return the cats to stop the breeding. Trapping random cats in this fashion, then killing them, if they are not already dead from blood loss after this horrific trapping, is just a stop-gap, lazy, quick-fix. Other cats left behind are going to continue to breed and they will continue to have a "feral cat problem"

I will be adding some addresses to this site for those compassionate people who want to voice their opinions that this is archaic and barbaric.